The Incomplete Cynic
Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.
The graduation rate in New York (state) is 64%, and it seems a lot of people are concerned and deeply upset that only 36% of those graduates are “college ready”, and they’re very anxious about solving this dire problem.
Should they increase graduation standards? Probably. Should they make promotion more challenging starting in earlier grades? Absolutely. Should they give students more choice in their high school coursework, as well as the opportunity to earn dual-credit with local colleges? Yes and Yes. Are any of these likely to satisfy the problem? Not really.
As long as there have been public high schools, there have been plenty of students who were just not capable of doing college-level work, even though they were qualified to graduate. College is supposed to be harder than high school, and, as a result, not everybody who could do high school level work is able to keep up.
In my opinion, if every high school graduate in a large sample (like New York) is capable of college work, college is too easy.
The only realistic way to make sure every graduate is college-ready is to make high school so difficult that only the college-ready will graduate. Of course, that will only make it needlessly hard to graduate, and depress grad rates. Not exactly a win-win. You could make college easier, but that’s just a waste of everyone’s time and money, and won’t provide the end result: work-ready college grads.
The real solution is something we heard a lot about after Pres. Obama’s election: manage expectations. Not every kid needs to go to college, and not every graduate should be able to get in to one. We should respect higher education enough to restrict admission to students who’ve proven they’re academic ability.
A statistic quoted in the article is that 75% of NYC grads need remedial college coursework. The most likely problem is that 50% of NYC grads should never have been admitted to college. When we deal with that reality, these numbers won’t seem so bad.
